Greetings

I am a beginner and have read some of the posts and the stickies to be best of my ability.

I have an IBM machine with

"Pentium 4 CPU 3.00 Ghz
2.99 GHz, 0,99 GB of RAM"

It has a 40 GB hard drive running XP Service Pack 2.

A friend has put in a 120 GB HD in a bay formerly occupied by a CD Drive.

This drive has been "Initialized" in Windows, but not yet formatted or partitioned.

My plan is to format the new HD and partition it, which I had first planned to do
using Windows's Disk Management and partition function.

However my friend (who is also interested in learning Knoppix/Linux over Windows)
suggested that it may be a more worthwhile learning experience to format the drive and partition it
using Knoppix. I would then install a different flavour of linux in each partition

I would presumably use the "Qparted" tool, but feel very unconfident in proceeding in something which I do not fully understand.

Could someone point me to a good beginners guide for this, or else give really simple instructions in what to do?

Kind Regards,

John